This short exchange, amusing as it may be (the subsequent Reddit thread is equally hilarious) tells us more about the benefits of Twitter as a tool for corporations/governments/public services than any study can. Twitter is the ideal channel for the Boston Police dept. to show its human face. I can't imagine any other communication channel that would be better used for both disseminating timely and essential information and creating a better public image for such an institution. Can you imagine a police department cracking jokes in their official PRs, or even at their own web site? On Twitter, however, it feels natural, and when you put the right person behind that Twitter stream, you can really show that you care about your users, customers, or - in this case - citizens.

Furthermore, it shows the importance of actually using Twitter as it's intended to use, not only as just another place to dump the contents of your RSS feed. Yes, you can do that, but then no one will actually read your tweets. But if people recognize that there's a real person updating those tweets, someone who really has something to say, Twitter can do wonders for your public image.

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